The Swallows of Kabul cover

The Swallows of Kabul

by Yasmina Khadra

Taliban Kabul. Two families, one sky, lived apart.

For you if

you want to understand what daily life under the Taliban actually felt like for the people inside it

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Two couples in Kabul under Taliban rule — one a former wealthy family now reduced to poverty and rage, one a prison warden and his wife. Khadra is Algerian, not Afghan, which makes this a visitor dispatch — but one written from inside the Islamic world rather than outside it. What he captures is the specific texture of life under a totalitarian theology — the small humiliations, the impossible choices, the way ideology distorts ordinary human feeling.

Where This Book Lives

Setting
Afghanistan • Central Asia
Voice
An outside perspective on Afghanistan

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